In U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,844,086 and 6,005,076 (“Murray II”), assigned to the assignee hereof and the disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference, there is described a process for the isolation of protein isolates from oil seed meal having a significant fat content, including canola oil seed meal having such content. The steps involved in this process include solubilizing proteinaceous material from oil seed meal, which also solubilizes fat in the meal, and removing fat from the resulting aqueous protein solution. The aqueous protein solution may be separated from the residual oil seed meal before or after the fat removal step. The defatted protein solution then is concentrated to increase the protein concentration while maintaining the ionic strength substantially constant, after which the concentrated protein solution may be subjected to a further fat removal step. The concentrated protein solution then is diluted to cause the formation of a cloud-like mass of highly associated protein molecules as discrete protein droplets in micellar form. The protein micelles are allowed to settle to form an aggregated, coalesced, dense, amorphous, sticky, gluten-like protein isolate mass, termed “protein micellar mass” or PMM, which is separated from the residual aqueous phase and dried.
The protein isolate has a protein content (as determined by Kjeldahl N×6.25) of at least about 90 wt %, is substantially undenatured (as determined by differential scanning calorimetry) and has a low residual fat content. The term “protein content” as used herein refers to the quantity of protein in the protein isolate expressed on a dry weight basis. The yield of protein isolate obtained using this procedure, in terms of the proportion of protein extracted from the oil seed meal which is recovered as dried protein isolate was generally less than 40 wt %, typically around 20 wt %.
The procedure described in the aforementioned Murray II patent was developed as a modification to and improvement on the procedure for forming a protein isolate from a variety of protein source materials, including oil seeds, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,208,323 (Murray IB). The oil seed meals available in 1980, when U.S. Pat. No. 4,208,323 issued, did not have the fat contamination levels of the canola oil seed meals available at the time of the Murray II patents, and, as a consequence, the procedure of U.S. Pat. No. 4,208,323 cannot produce from such oil seed meals processed according to the Murray II process, proteinaceous materials which have more than 90 wt % protein content. There is no description of any specific experiments in U.S. Pat. No. 4,208,303 carried out using rapeseed (canola) meal as the starting material.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,208,323 itself was designed to be an improvement on the process described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,169,090 and 4,285,862 (Murray IA) by the introduction of a concentration step prior to dilution to form the PMM. The Murray IA patents describe one experiment involving rapeseed but provides no indication of the purity of the product. The concentration step described in the Murray IB patent served to improve the yield of protein isolate from around 20% for the Murray IA process.